In retrospect, it was such a trivial argument following a happy, yet also very long and exhausting family celebration.

Mary Lynn Vialpando

But it would have lasting repercussions for Mary Lynne Renkel Vialpando, her husband and their child.

The argument and Mary’s reaction to it, would put her in the path of a rapist and killer in the early morning hours of June 5, 1988 in Old Colorado City in West Colorado Springs.

It was the worst kind of chance.

The day before, Vialpando, 24, and her husband Robert had gone with family to Pueblo for the spring wedding of Robert’s brother and sister-in-law.

When the Vialpandos returned home early the next morning and Robert invited his brother and sister inside their house, Mary Lynne was livid.

The home she shared with her husband and 4-year-old daughter was messy.

The young mother had to juggle caring for her daughter and studying for sports medicine classes at Denver Technical University, and Mary Lynne was embarrassed to have company in her home, according to her sister, Cynthia Renkel, who lives in Parker.

Early that morning she dashed outside on foot. She was last seen by her family running away from her home on the 2200 block W. Kiowa St.

It’s unclear what she was doing, whether she had any plans to go somewhere in particular or was just running off steam.

The athletic woman was not afraid to venture out that late, not in an area only about four blocks from where she was raised and where everyone who lived there knew each other, Renkel said.

Witnesses later told police that they saw her try to enter the bar Thunder and Buttons, 2415 W. Colorado Ave., but she did not have any money and couldn’t pay the cover charge, she said.

She then dashed in and out of Roger’s Bar, 2520 W. Colorado Ave., and walked west from the bar onto the north alley between 2:30 a.m. and 3 a.m., according to Renkel and a Colorado Springs police report.

“She walked through the front door and out the back,” Renkel said.
People who live near the alley later told police they heard a woman scream that night.

“Nobody did anything about it,” Renkel said.

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Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.